When Life Gives You Gluten, Bake A Better Cookie with Carolyn Haeler

A bad cookie changed everything. When our guest, Mightylicious founder and CEO Carolyn Haeler, was blindsided by celiac disease, she didn’t just swap pasta for salad—she rebuilt how gluten free cookies are made, from flour particle size to protein balance. What started as a health crisis became a masterclass in food science and a blueprint for turning frustration into a beloved national brand.

We dig into the diagnosis that flipped her life overnight and the hidden gluten that trips up even careful eaters: caramel color in sodas and vinegar, cross-contaminated spices, fermented sauces, and preservatives in deli meats. Carolyn breaks down why so many gluten free products disappoint—grit from rice milled for cooking, bitter aftertastes from ancient grains, pale bakes with no caramelization—and how a custom milled rice flour and whole milk powder restored structure, browning, and flavor without the telltale “GF” compromise. Her brown butter chocolate chip opened doors at Whole Foods, but the real story is what it took to scale consistent quality in a certified gluten free world where one mistake can send 600 pounds of dough to the bin.

If you’re navigating celiac or gluten intolerance, you’ll get practical strategies for eating well at home and on the road, plus a candid look at the tradeoffs behind price and ingredients. If you’re a builder at heart, you’ll hear how Carolyn financed growth, sourced scarce inputs through droughts and cocoa spikes, and found the right manufacturing partners to keep standards high. We also spotlight the product lineup—seven flavors, with the vegan, non-GMO oatmeal coconut winning fans who never expected to prefer it to chocolate chip.

Press play to learn how science, persistence, and taste buds can coexist—and why solving your own problem might just serve thousands more. If this story resonates, follow the show, leave a review, and share it with a friend who loves a good cookie comeback.

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Carolyn’s Celiac Diagnosis Journey

SPEAKER_01 0:12

Well, hello, and welcome to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Grumbine, and today we have a special guest. Her name is Carolyn Haler, and she's the founder and CEO of Mighty Licious Gluten Free. And she's got a great story to tell us about uh dealing with celiac and how she went to create this wonderful company. So, Carolyn, without further ado, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks so much for having me. Absolutely. It's my pleasure. So it seems that um celiac has become a much more common um ailment these days. You know, when I was a kid, we all ate everything we wanted to, and and once in a while somebody had a peanut allergy or something. But um now today uh it seems that our guts are a mess, and and I it's likely to do with uh combining of the world's food sources and ultra-processing things and whatnot. But why don't you tell us a little bit about your story about how you came to this uh this place that you're at?

SPEAKER_00 1:18

Yeah, I mean celiac disease is interesting, and there's a lot of different people who fall into sort of the gluten-free category. Of course, celiac disease is um one of them, but gluten intolerance is also far more common, which is a little bit different. It's more of like an allergy with symptoms. I did not have I don't you can develop celiac disease, it is an autoimmune disease and it's something that you can develop. It's something you can be born with, you can be diagnosed very young, but it's also something that you can develop. And I lived a gluten full life for the first 31 years of my life. I ate everything. I didn't worry about what I ate, I just ate what I wanted and what I enjoyed. And I loved food and I loved cooking and I loved baking. It was a hobby of mine at that point. Um, and I'd had the opportunity to live in different countries. So I'd let it in Italy. I've traveled a lot in Paris. I've eaten all of the pasta and the croissants, and I've had all the German beer, and I love food. And I graduated from business school in 2010 and moved to New York City. And I started having some symptoms I never really dealt with before. It's just some very minor indigestion, which is not a big deal, but it was something that I was annoying enough that I talked to my GP about it. And over about nine months of testing and developed, like the symptoms progressed to the point where my immune system was failing. My skin had turned gray, my hair was falling out, my stomach was distended, I'd had um body aches and joint pain. And my doctor looked at me. I was so ill that my doctor looked at me and said, Maybe you have HIV. And I was like, Why didn't you test for that nine months ago? Um, and that is a pretty um startling thing to hear. Um, and this was back in 2011, 2012, and um HIV was still the there's it's progressed, the treatments have progressed quite a lot, but back then it was still rather scary. Um, fortunately for me, I did have to live with that anxiety for very long because I had a colonospian endoscopy schedule to see what was going on with my gut, and they found the antibodies um in my colon for celiac disease. We had tests for it.

SPEAKER_01 3:36

Yeah, it's not like a lot of things where they have to spend their time and kind of narrow things down.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

Yeah, and I had done the blood tests. There's way like we tested for blood for gluten and uh and dairy and eggs and all of those things, and I'd even done some elimination diets um, you know, as we were trying to figure out what was going on with me. But they clearly found the antibodies. I was handed a piece of paper that said, don't eat gluten. And they're like, Congratulations.

SPEAKER_01 4:01

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 4:03

Part of me was very relieved because celiac disease felt far more manageable than HIV.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

That's for sure.

Eliminating Gluten And Rapid Recovery

Hidden Gluten In Everyday Foods

SPEAKER_00 4:11

Yeah. So I was relatively relieved, and it was just a couple days before Thanksgiving, and I was like, you know what? I've already done the elimination diets. I am only going to eat things that you were pulled off a tree, off a stem, or cut, like where I could physically see where it was cut off the animal, right? Like only whole foods that I know have nothing. And within 24 hours, my cheeks turned pink again. It was that immediate that my body started to recover. Obviously, I'd done a lot of damage because um celac disease is permanent. You're destroying um your colon, which is why it was turning gray. Your colon is where you absorb nutrition. And so my grayness was from the damage that I had done to my colon. Um, but within 24 hours of basically just eating apples, barclay, and chicken, I um killed again because I had eliminated basically all the toxins that I had been consuming. And so it started a journey for me because at the time, when you think about gluten, you think about bread and pasta, donuts, cake, things like that. Um, but gluten is actually in most things, and I didn't know this at the time. It's used as a color, a preservative, and a filler. So it's in things like apple cider vinegar, it's in Pepsi and Coca-Cola, it's in ginger ale. Um, all those things have caramel color, and caramel, the caramel color comes from gluten. So anything that has caramel color in the ingredients has gluten in it, and that's a lot of things. Even things that would naturally be gluten-free, like apple cider vinegar, they may add caramel color to it because a color can fade or change during the distribution process.

SPEAKER_01 5:51

Right.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

Um things like soy sauce are fermented with gluten. I've been um I've been glutened before by cinnamon, even though the ingredients said cinnamon, because it can be used as a filler, or there can just be, you know, they don't necessarily change the line during the manufacturing process. There could just be cross-contamination from whatever was on that milling line the cycle before. Um, and so I've had cinnamon and I've gotten contaminated before. And then it's in things like as a preservative, it's in imitation crabs. So that's sushi and California rolls. It can be in turkey and ham because it's used as a preservative in things like fold cuts.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

Wow.

Life Logistics With Strict Gluten Avoidance

SPEAKER_00 6:33

So literally everything in the grocery store has gluten in it. Um, even things that should be or could be naturally gluten-free will have it in there as some sort of color preservative. And so that changed my life profoundly. When you are no longer basically able to shop at a grocery store or go out to eat, your dietary restriction is unbelievably restricted. Um and I was working at the time, my background is in finance. I was working on Wall Street. I was getting up, I was a stockbroker. So I was getting up at 5 a.m. in the morning to go to the gym, getting into the office before the markets open, not leaving because I was, you know, building my business and not leaving until after the sun had set. And um I wasn't able to like make a sandwich or or grab a bagel, which is really becomes like very inconvenient in your life. Most of the foods that we consume have been developed for convenience and for busy people and for um, you know, transportability. And then when you remove all those products, you're like, well, I'm making a salad from scratch every day and bringing it with me every day because I don't know what can be cross-contaminated. I don't know what's in the salad dressing. Everything has to be from my kitchen. Um, and that became a burden. It became um a challenge. And even to today, even though I've been living with this for decades now, um, like I have to worry about when I travel for I travel all over the country for my business. I always book an Airbnb so that as opposed to a hotel. So the hotel is not going to have gluten-free options for me. If it's gonna be the one thing I can on the menu I can eat that I'll have to eat every single day. Um, so I always book an Airbnb because I know it'll have a kitchen. I know that I'll be able to feed myself. I always have to think about is there a convenience store? Is there a grocery store? Will I be able to go and get food that's healthy for me as I travel? And those are things I always was able to take for granted, right? Like it didn't matter.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

It's not convenient to carry a big ice chest with you on the airplane.

The Bad Cookie That Sparked A Company

SPEAKER_00 8:32

No, no, and even like when I'm traveling to get on the plane, I there's certain foods I can't even take through with me. And then I get there, like, show me where your yogurt is. Um so all of these things add up, and it's it's a daily, like when you are diagnosed with something that is so restrictive as celiac disease is eating becomes a battle, and it's a daily hour-to-hour battle. It's not uh something you get to take for granted anymore. And I was so I was living with this disease, you know, building my career. And one day I had a really bad, I was having a really bad day, I was having a really bad week, I had a really bad month, I was didn't like my job. And I had a really I was shopping and I had a really bad cookie. It was gluten-free. I'd been shopping all day. I was tired, I was happy, um, it was cold out. Um, I was online and it was Christmas time, so the line was like a hundred people long. And I grabbed this package of gluten-free cookies and I was so excited because I was like, oh, I really need a cookie right now. And it was so disappointing that I like didn't even swallow it. I didn't even I took a bite and didn't even like continue eating the cookie. And I was like, now I have to buy these cookies, they're$10. I'm going to throw them away before I even leave the store. Um, and that was the moment that I was like, I'm just gonna make a better gluten-free cookie. I I have a background in business and I love to bake. And so I did. It wasn't so easy. It was quite the process, the research and development phase of actually creating a cookie that I was proud of and would feel um confident selling um took months of development. But I spent, I left my job, I spent, you know, 12 hours a day baking in my studio apartment, developing cookies.

SPEAKER_01 10:13

And um just one day I got this idea and you said, I want to sell cookies instead of being a stockbroker.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

Yeah, stop being a stockbroker and I became an entrepreneur. I'd always I'd gone to business school, I'd always wanted to be an entrepreneur. It was always something that fascinated me that I was interested in, but I never had an idea. And you can't just become an entrepreneur. You have there has to be an idea, there has to be a problem you have or something that you want to solve that you keep bringing a unique perspective to, and it's something that you can't stop thinking about. Um, I didn't have that, and I knew that. Um and then I suddenly had this idea. I was like, I've been eating these foods for almost a decade now, they're horrendous. Gluten-free products can be barely edible, um, but they're very expensive. There has to be a better way to do this, and I'm gonna be the one to do it.

SPEAKER_01 10:58

And was it the taste or the texture or the taste, texture, and the appearance? It's okay.

SPEAKER_00 11:06

Everything.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

Zero out of three.

Why Gluten Free Bakes Taste Off

SPEAKER_00 11:08

Zero out of three. So gluten-free products, and I I know a lot more about why this happens now. There's there's a lot of chemistry and there's a lot of technical um baking is science and it's it's it's chemistry. And so there's a lot of technical reasons why gluten-free products come out the way they are. Um they're often very gritty, um, and that's because they're the base of gluten-free flour is rice, and we don't amazingly we we make manufacture a lot of rice flour, a lot of rice, and we grow rice in the United States in three different states. We manufacture a lot of rice flour here because we have the rice, um, but we mill it for cooking, not for baking. Oh. So it's not milled fine enough. And so it can't absorb the moisture. Like when you're making a dough, you're taking a wet ingredient, combining it with a dry ingredient, it homogenizes, becomes a dough, and transforms into a new thing. Well, if your flour isn't milled fine enough, it can never homogenize.

SPEAKER_01 11:59

So it can't actually people don't understand surface area and how water takes time to absorb it, it has to touch everything, otherwise it doesn't.

SPEAKER_00 12:08

And rice also doesn't absorb butter the same way that we like different brains don't necessarily absorb moisture and different pro different ingredients the same way. Um so so what ends up happening is gluten-free products are very gritty, like you can feel the rice flour, sort of feels like sand in your mouth, very fine sand, but still sandy, which is not not no one's like, oh, I'd like some sand in my food.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

Um, and that gluten is that gooey, stretchy stuff that just makes everything so lovely.

Building A Better Flour Blend

SPEAKER_00 12:36

Yeah, gluten is protein, which is stretchy. It's provides body, but also so the gluten in wheat provides body and strength, so elasticity, um, so that when the baker bakes and the liquid evaporated, it creates pockets, air pockets, which is where you get the crumb from. Why it's why croissants are so flaky, it's why cake is so so bouncy. Um when you remove that, oftentimes gluten-free products don't rise the same way. And they they absolutely, if you're making a cake, you have to make it half the size of a normal wheat product if you cannot get the rise out of it. Um gluten also is flavor, so it caramelizes and it turns brown, which is why you get lovely color and caramelization um in wheat-based products. And it's also um flavor, so it also tastes good and it's very neutral. So wheat flour is unbelievably neutral. It can go with sweet things, it can go with savory things, but it has sort of a car, like a caramel flavor to it, which just goes with everything, it just complements it. It's like vanilla, yeah. Yeah, without without overpowering anything either. It's very mild. There are no other flowers like that. So rice is very neutral, but it doesn't have rice has one four hundredth the protein of wheat, which is why it doesn't bake very well. Um, there's ancient grains like sorghum flour, millet flour, amaranth flour, which are often used in gluten-free blends, and they have much higher um levels of protein. Sorghum flour in particular has nearly the same amount of protein as wheat flour. The problem is they don't taste good. In fact, by saying they don't taste good, I'm being generous. They do not taste good. Um, they get when you bake them past 150 degrees in particular, they get an acrid, bitter aftertaste. So sort of like a smell of cigarettes. Like imagine the smell of cigarettes as a flavor in your mouth. That is what it tastes like. And sorghum is added to almost everything and in smaller quantities. So it's not like it's just sorghum flour, it's mostly rice flour some tapioca starch, probably, and then sorghum flour. However, when you swallow it, even if there's a small amount, you still taste it. It's still, and it sort of sticks to the back of your throat. And that's why a lot of people have this negative reaction to gluten-free, is because when you bite into something, you get a little bit of grittiness. You can get past the grittiness, though you'd prefer not prefer it not be there. You taste the butter and the sugar, but then you swallow it and you're like, uh, what?

SPEAKER_01 15:07

That's why I hate this.

Whole Foods Breakthrough And Launch

SPEAKER_00 15:09

Yeah. And then you don't forget that. It's something that you remember. Um, most people are like, you know what? It's so it's bad enough that most people are like, I just won't eat. You know it's a cookie, but I just, I'll just wait till later when I get a normal cookie. Yeah. Um, and so I figured that out. Like I knew sorghum when I started my cookie company, I knew the sorghum flour tasted terrible. I that was something I knew that I'd been reading labels. I had been baking my own things. I knew that sorghum was not going to taste good. I wanted my product to taste good. I wanted my product to taste exactly like a wheat product. I wanted to look like a wheat product, I wanted to taste like a wheat product. Um, I didn't want it to be gritty or grainy. I didn't want it to have an aftertaste, and I didn't want it to be pale. Another thing with rice flour or something that's rice flour based is it's very pale, so it sort of looks anemic and you don't get that brown caramelization you get from wheat flour. Um, and so I created my own flour blend. And that was the hardest part because a cookie is a cookie. Obviously, there's many different cookies, but everyone, like a cookie is flour, butter, eggs, some sugar and vanilla, a little bit of baking soda. Um, you can play with those ingredients a little bit and create different textures and things like that. But we know how to make a cookie. That science has been um discovered. What we don't aren't good at is replacing wheat flour with anything because wheat is the technology that makes baking happen. Um, so I created my own flour blend and I realized that I couldn't get um rice flour that was milled fine enough. So I actually work with, I found a rice co-op that had its own mill and they mill our flour for us to a spec so that it's soft and pillowy and it's not gritty. And then instead of replacing the protein with an ancient grain, and I have nothing against ancient grains because they are good for you, but you should be eating sorghum and quinoa and millet with like chicken picata. You shouldn't be having it in your cookies. Um, it's lovely in a savory application, especially if there's other strong spices like onions and bay leaf and other things that can compete with it and balance it out, but vanilla will never balance out sorghum flour.

SPEAKER_01 18:04

Um about things like um coconut and almond and uh and uh cassava flour.

Scaling, Supply Chain, And Cash Flow

SPEAKER_00 18:11

Um coconut flour um often leaves a coconut-y flavor. I have baked with coconut flour. Coconut absorbs so much moisture that um it just changes the baking.

SPEAKER_01 18:25

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 18:26

But it's not bad. I certainly would recommend using coconut flour. It's higher in protein. Um, you do sort of get a coconut essence to whatever you're baking, though, uh, which is not a bad thing. I like coconut, but it's not always what I want. Almond flour I like. Um I've baked with almond flour. It's not it's also uh it's a nut. So commercially, um, and I wasn't going, I wasn't going for like a high protein cookie. Um and almond flour just doesn't have the buoyancy that you need.

SPEAKER_01 19:01

It's heavy, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:02

Yeah, it's heavy. I love almond flour. I certainly have baked with it, and it's something that I use personally, but it's not and it's also extremely expensive. So what you have to also consider is that wheat flour costs five cents per pound. Rice flour costs two dollars per pound. I don't even know what almond flour costs.

SPEAKER_01 19:20

Probably more, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:21

Yeah. So the diff one of the reasons why gluten-free products are so much more expensive is because five cents to two dollars is exponentially more expensive. It's tremendous. Um so, like in most products, your cheapest ingredient is the flour. And gluten-free baking, when you're baking gluten-free, the flour, which is the bulk of your recipe, is one of the most expensive ingredients. The only two ingredients more expensive are vanilla and chocolate chips if we're making a chocolate chip cookie. Um, so expense really matters because I make a cookie that costs like my costs are like$267. By the time that gets to the consumer, it's a nine to ten dollar cookie.

SPEAKER_01 20:01

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

So ingredients have to be um within a certain price point in order to be make it viable for retail.

SPEAKER_01 20:09

Got it.

Manufacturing Gluten Free At Scale

SPEAKER_00 20:10

Um so I created this flour blend. I added whole milk powder to replace the um protein, and it tastes wonderful. It performs just like wheat flour in most applications. Um, it has no aftertaste and it's not um gritty. So I spend months developing this and figuring it out. I mean, there's six different ingredients in it. So there's lots of different permutations of like getting the right balance of like starch versus protein versus rice. Um, figure that out and created a cookie that was frankly the best cookie that I ever created. It's my brown butter chocolate chip. Um, walked into a Whole Foods on the upper east side and said, I'm looking for feedback. I may I make gluten-free cookies. And um, the woman in the information booth was like, Oh, go talk to Chris. He's at the team leader in the bakery section. He's behind the cakes. And I was like, Okay. Um, I walk over there and I was like, Chris, and he was like, Yeah. He comes around and I was like, I make gluten-free cookies. I have some samples. Um, looking for feedback, he tasted it and he goes, This is the best cookie that I've ever tasted. I want to go down to Union Square. He's like, I'm the team leader. I want you to, he gave me his card. He's like, I want you to go down to Union Square and to the Brooklyn Whole Foods. We sell more gluten-free products than any other Whole Foods in Manhattan. Um, ask for the team leader there. And if we all email the regional office at the same time, we have this like local forager program where they can onboard you um to Whole Foods. And so I did.

SPEAKER_01 21:37

Oh, what a good first step, huh?

SPEAKER_00 21:39

Yeah, this was a Thursday, and I was being onboarded by Monday.

SPEAKER_01 21:43

Wow.

Product Line And Bestsellers

SPEAKER_00 21:44

So, and it was very small. Like it wasn't like, you know, I um I went home. I didn't have any like insurance, I didn't have any food handlers exactly. Right, right. Where are you gonna make there's licenses you have to get, you have to get insurance, you have to be certified, like there's all these things you can't just sell food to the public. Um, it's a regulated industry. So I got all those ducks in order. Um, found a little um kitchen that I could rent by the hour in Queens, like a commercial facility that was regulated and had all the licenses, and started with three Whole Foods um in Manhattan, quickly grew to 10 Whole Foods in Manhattan, and then to the Northeast and North Atlantic region. Um, and that was what um launched my business. And now we are in most states, we're all over the nation. We're in Giants, we're in Walmart, we're in H E B out in Texas, we're in small independence.

SPEAKER_01 22:36

Um, we just lost you able to scale up pretty easily. I mean, you know, you had you said you had a little rice co-op making your flour. Were they able to keep up with your needs?

SPEAKER_00 22:47

Yeah, I mean, scaling is COVID was the biggest challenge to scaling. Scaling is um, I was able to source all of my ingredients. I'm particularly good at finding and sourcing ingredients. Okay. Um Managing supply chain is always it's always a hurdle. It's always there's always something like a couple of years ago, there was a big drought down in South America and none of all the vanilla orchids died. So there's no vanilla. Like there's always like things. There's like supply chain is like the hardest part. Um, you know, there's cocoa shortages, and it, you know, they're good now we're dealing with tariffs.

SPEAKER_01 23:21

And cocoa butter right now, it's like yeah, 10 times what it was five years ago.

SPEAKER_00 23:26

I know. I know. It's the chocolate, every single quarter the price of chocolate goes up. Um, it's extremely like so it's a challenge, but I've never had a problem with keeping up. The hard part in scaling a business is the cash flow.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

Yeah.

Founders’ Advice: Be The Solution

Where To Find Mightylicious

SPEAKER_00 23:43

When you're growing rapidly and you're growing exponentially, is going from like I was when I started my business, I would just had a credit card and I was just buying my ingredients with my credit card, uh, you know, baking on the weekends, delivering to Whole Foods, getting paid 30 days later, paying off my credit card, and just had this sort of revolving light of credit, and that was all I needed. But then going to two full regions, that's an entirely different sort of adding zeros to that, it gets and my credit card company was like, Yeah, you're you're past your limit. You can't you've been buying$5,000 worth of ingredients and now suddenly you want 100K. So that that's more was more the challenge. It's the challenge was A, um, financing it, and then B, um find when you're sort of in that middle ground where you're sort of like going from doing it yourself and being able to like bake everything by hand and then going to where you certainly cannot do that. You need a professional facility to be keeping up. There's sort of um food manufacturers want you to be selling truckloads of product and they want a guarantee contract. If they're going to give you time in their facility, um, they want to know how, like they want a full day shift minimum. Um, and they want you to guarantee demand and they want to know what days they're baking on for the entire year. And when you're growing and you're small, you're like, I don't need a full truckload of piece. And I have multiple flavors, and that means changing the line over. Um, and so it's hard to find sort of that mid-tier manufacturer that is willing to take you on and grow with you. Um, so that was a big hurdle that I had to overcome was finding the right partner because while there are sort of middle-tier manufacturers, I'm gluten-free. There's very few certified gluten-free facilities, period, in the US. And then they have to be able to execute it. And gluten-free is tricky. Um, it's very tricky. Lots of things that go wrong with wheat flour can be adjusted by like adding a little more water, adding a little more milk, you know. That is not if something goes wrong with gluten-free, it's you, you're throwing out the dough. Um, and so throwing out 600 pounds of dough is a serious expense.

SPEAKER_01 25:57

Right.

SPEAKER_00 25:57

Um so it is, it is tricky. So finding the right at that phase, my biggest hurdle is finding the right partner uh to help to manufacture.

SPEAKER_01 26:06

How many different cookies do you have?

Closing Thanks

SPEAKER_00 26:08

We now have seven flavors. Um, we have all of our cookies are gluten-free, and then we have four four flavors that are gluten-free and vegan and non-GMO certified. Um, our best-selling flavor is oatmeal coconut, which is gluten-free and vegan and non-GMO. Um, it's a recipe from my wife's side of the family that's over 100 years old that I adapted to be gluten-free and vegan, and it's fantastic. It is sweet, it is salty, it's a little bit exotic from the coconut, it is comforting from the oatmeal. Um, and it's soft, um, but also a little bit crunchy. It's it's wonderful. And most people like don't believe me when I tell them my oatmeal coconut cookie is number one because we're this is America and we love chocolate chip. Yeah. And so my I have two chocolate chip flavors and they're number two and number three in my top three. So um, but this is just such a wonderful cookie. And I I like coconut and I also like oatmeal, but I would have never been like, you know what? I'm gonna make an oatmeal coconut cookie, but this cookie is just wonderful. Um, and it's our best-selling, and when most people taste it, they're like, oh yeah, that's that's my favorite. Um, and then we have brown butter chocolate chip, which is number two. That was the first cookie I ever created. It's wonderful. We have a vegan chocolate chip, and that's number three. Um and then we have four additional flavors. We have shortbread, we have peanut butter, which is brain-free, and um dairy-free. We have an oatmeal raisin, which is does really, really, I think it's our my top seller online is my oatmeal raisin cookie. It's a huge fan base. You don't, it doesn't do as well in the retail stores, but online people really love the oatmeal raisin. Um, and then we have Double Dutch.

SPEAKER_01 27:52

Nice shop. So if you had you got quite a story of of invention and and you know, the whole process of all of this and even where it came from. If you had one thought to leave our listeners with today, what do you think that would be?

SPEAKER_00 28:13

Oh, I have lots of thoughts on what?

SPEAKER_01 28:17

I have lots of thoughts on on starting a business, on well, just you know, you've you you've shared a a robust story. If there was one thing that you wanted to our listeners to take away from this, well, what do you think it would be today?

SPEAKER_00 28:32

Um, I think that it would be if you see a problem and you think you can like, and it's a problem that's impacting not just you, but a lot of people, um, be the solution. Find you if if you know there's a problem and you know that there must be a better answer, go find that solution. Starting my own business has been the most rewarding thing I could have ever done in my life. It has changed my life. I never wake up and don't want to go to work. I never, no matter how bad the day is, and I've had some really bad days, um, where every basically everything's gone wrong, and you know, I've lost a lot of money. And I still, I still love those days. It just brings so much joy to my life. Um and in a in a way that I never imagined possible.

SPEAKER_01 29:21

Plus, you get all the cookies you can eat.

SPEAKER_00 29:23

Yes, exactly. Just so many cookies. My my I've been testing my flour recipe, so I was making some cakes, and my my four-year-old goes, mommy, hundreds and hundreds of cakes. Why do we need all of these cakes?

SPEAKER_01 29:34

I love it. Fair, fair. So the question of the day is how do people find you and your cookies?

SPEAKER_00 29:41

Um, you can find us in a lot of places. We are in Walmart on the East Coast, we're in Giants in the Mid-Atlantic, we are in H E B out in Texas, we're in lots of, we're at hundreds of other stores and smaller chains that I don't know all the names of um across the US. If you can't find us at your local grocery store, um you can find us at mydelcious.com. We ship to all 50 states. If you buy three bags or more, shipping is free. So that's by three bags um or more. You get the shipping for free. And we're also on Amazon. So obviously, Amazon Prime.

SPEAKER_01 30:13

I love it. I love it. Well, Carolyn, this has been a great conversation. I, you know, I'm a big fan of cookies myself, so I uh I was interested ahead of time to hear about your story. So just want to thank you for joining us today. And um, you know, and what a what a great experience.

SPEAKER_00 30:33

Thank you so much. This has been really fun.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

Excellent. Well, this has been another episode of the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Grumba, and I want to thank all of our listeners that make this show possible, and we will see you next time.